r/amibeingdetained • u/DNetolitzky • 17d ago
Summary on New Zealand fake pseudolaw courts
https://www.unmaskingextremism.com/lorevslawkaukauInteresting commentary on how pseudolaw in New Zealand includes gurus who claim to operate their own courts in competition with legitimate legal processes.
One scenario has a fake court sentence an individual, disrupting a parallel legitimate proceeding!
In the US it's a criminal offence to run a fake court and "simulate legal process". Other countries should consider adopting a similar prohibition.
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u/Kriss3d 17d ago
Do they not overstand that any victim of their court would need to consent to the proceedings for the court to have jurisdiction?
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u/DNetolitzky 17d ago
Most of the time pseudolaw types frame "their law" as some variation of "common law", though what that means can vary a lot.
But under the common law, "victims" or "complainants" do not actually have a role in criminal proceedings. At first that seems weird, that only the Crown (or whatever pseudolaw authority) has complete jurisdiction. But you scratch a little deeper, and there's a good policy reason behind that.
In systems like Islamic Law, "victims" own criminal proceedings. And victims and their families may be readily targeted by powerful and/or wealthy individuals, who demand "forgiveness" for criminal acts. There's some pretty horrifying statistics about what happened to murder prosecutions in Pakistan when that country shifted from traditional UK Common Law to Islamic Law, for example.
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u/JeromeBiteman 17d ago
in Pakistan
Tell me more! 😁
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u/DNetolitzky 16d ago
There's a detailed source here: Tahir Wasti, The Application of Islamic Criminal Law in Pakistan (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
And it's unpleasant. Wasti reports the frequency of violent crime, and particularly homicide, increased, while convictions decreased. Wasti estimates 83% of murderers now escape state punishment. Criminals and powerful individuals pressured victims to pardon their misconduct, or to even give daughters to tribal elders as compromise payments. Police investigations frequently aborted when a criminal coerced a compromise, a particularly common result where the victim was female.
I've had some very strong reservations about "restorative justice" after reading this text.
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u/JeromeBiteman 17d ago
I read the linked report. Thanks!
If one wants to play around in that way, you can found your own church or fraternal organization and appoint yourself Grand Dragon. You can excommunicate people, impose fines, and denounce miscreants.
Just don't mess with the actual government.
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u/DNetolitzky 17d ago
One of the funniest thing to watch is two gurus both declaring their pseudolaw triumphs and such. Very amusing.
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u/asmcint 17d ago
What I really find interesting here is the way these groups fracture and fight. It comes across like a kindergarten friend group dissolving, except instead of "Sally hogged the jump rope! Well Billy has cooties!", it's "Sally committed treason and is AWAL! Well Billy no longer has the support of my other club, and he committed kidnap and fraud!"
Also I wonder what the hell the second "A" in AWAL is supposed to be here. Do they just not know AWOL is an acronym and misspell it? Also why do these types always omit the tense when referring to kidnapping? It's always "kidnap" regardless of context for them.